Those of us who write for the British broadsheet press think we know the supreme value of journalistic independence. Even the editors of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids will go to their graves reciting with sincerity their lifelong defence of the freedom of the writer - the columnist, the reporter, scribes of every kind – to perform without interference from government. Proprietors may be another matter, but in the eyes of most British editors who work for powerful proprietors, the owner’s instructions do not count as interference. So we all have our ways of wallowing in the pieties of the British way of journalism. We observe no official agendas. We think we have no constituency except our readers, otherwise known as markets. We can rattle off the canons of independence, even though in the grubby worlds of commerce and propaganda these may not always be perfectly observed.
Editing a paper that speaks out of, and to some extent into, an avowedly authoritarian institution such as the Roman Catholic Church is an altogether subtler task. The ground rules are different. The usual pieties cannot erase the context, or the sense that there is a particular constituency to be addressed. Independence requires a more scrupulous definition than is usually to be found in the self-serving clichés of the Daily Mail. The Tablet has not become arguably the most influential Catholic weekly in the world by flailing against all authority. Such is the nature of its audience that it would not have survived had it taken that path. And yet, within its own context, it has retained, above all else, independence.
The genius of John Wilkins – I do not use the world lightly – in his two decades as editor of The Tablet is to have trodden a path between the traps that lie in wait for anyone in his position. He has preserved the paper’s identity, embedded in the Catholic Christian tradition, as a loyal friend of the Church from which it grew. Yet he has insisted that neither loyalty nor friendship require servility or obedience. He has maintained the kind of independence that no journalism, whatever niche it occupies, can afford to sacrifice if it wishes serious readers to believe what it writes.
This definition of The Tablet’s role has not been as easily accepted within the Church as some of us had every reason to believe it should have been. John’s time as editor, after all, began when the philosophy of Vatican II, which the paper had dedicated itself to serving ever since the end of the Council, still appeared to bathe the Roman Church – certainly the English branch of it – in the glow of openness and tolerance that is consistent, among other things, with the best kind of journalism. But old mind-sets die hard. Not every bishop is a born Jeffersonian democrat, and by no means every strand of English Catholicism has foresworn the blind fealties of the pre-conciliar faith. While John was far too canny to engage in open battles with the hierarchy, there were vigilant eyes over his shoulder that still have only a shallow understanding of an editor’s perspective. They assumed – still do, in some cases – that the task of The Tablet was to be the unquestioning voice of Rome.
Nowhere was this misunderstanding more palpable than in Rome itself. Throughout John’s editorship, the very influence his paper acquired redoubled the complaints in the Vatican that its orthodoxy did not come up to muster. We witnessed the incapacity of the truly authoritarian mind to understand the most elementary meaning of journalistic independence. In certain corners of the Vatican The Tablet is criticised for its heterodoxy but more so, even after 20 years’ evidence to the contrary, for the perception that it is itself an organ of the English branch of the Roman Church and therefore engaging in the heresy of criticism with official blessing. Some English bishops – a small minority perhaps – might like it to be more like that. Some Church leaders in John’s time have thought nothing of calling him in for discussions that were not meant to be entirely collegial conversations between equals. But they knew, in the end, their limits. In Rome, the concept of a paper that is both truly Catholic and truly independent is literally beyond the comprehension of cardinals steeped in the culture of their own institutional power.
John has seen off these challenges thanks, in my opinion, to four great qualities he brought to the job of editing. He once told me he regarded the job as his vocation. I inferred this to mean it was the job above all others he was born to do, and to which he could bring the kind of commitment one might liken to that of a dedicated pastor.
This highlights his first virtue: an almost fanatical industry. He has cared about every word appearing in every issue of the paper he edited. He has been a hard-driving editor, not always easy for his small staff to work with. But great editors, especially of weekly papers, are often like that. They have to be. Their personal passions are what make their paper special, and their dedication to the details are usually what make it unique. There needs to be an element of benevolent dictatorship, which, rather like William Shawn, the legendary editor of the New Yorker for several decades in the mid-twentieth century, John duly supplied to The Tablet. Day and night, seven days a week, he toiled over the commissioning, the re-writing, the sub-editing, the correcting and – very necessary – the rejecting of what next week’s paper might contain.
Personally I have never known him lose his cool or courtesy, though perhaps his staff has seen his collar get a little warm. But there was an iron rigour about his references and standards. He was a catholic as well as Catholic editor, but always clear that The Tablet should consist of pieces that passed his own subjective test of what was worth printing. The Tablet became his paper, as it had to be. John earned this right by giving his life to it, paying the costs as well as gaining the satisfactions of that degree of commitment.
This opens up his second great quality: the fact that he developed a vision of what The Tablet should become, and worked by slow degrees to make it happen. The formula proved an extraordinary success. He knew what his readers wanted, the tone that stimulated them, the range of subjects that would appeal. The circulation all but tripled in his time, without benefit of the massive marketing that pushed one of The Tablet’s contemporaries, the Spectator, at much expense, into a different league. The more interesting comparison is with the New Statesman, whose present circulation barely exceeds The Tablet’s. As The Tablet’s audience grew, the New Statesman’s shrank.
How did this happen? I think it owed much to a twin approach, subtly brought about, that has made John’s Tablet distinctive. On the one hand, he eased it out of the Catholic, and even the religious, ghetto. It retained that special feel. But what it had to say about the politics and complications of the moment, especially when they were international, made it a mainstream presence. At the same time, its agenda, like its perspective, remained its own. From the start, this was, of course, ecumenical. That was elementary, and added greatly to The Tablet’s audience. But it amplified a wider journalistic point. Read down the Tablet index of contents in any week, and compare these with what its secular competitors announce, and you find, unfailingly, many fewer pieces that simply re-hash the issues the daily papers have incessantly chewed over. Time and again, its roots give it something else to say. For readers in search of fresh fields of controversy to graze, The Tablet offers much the largest diet of originality.
In the international field especially, there is no contest. The universal Church supplies not only a religious dimension to the discussion of global problems. It guarantees a more universal agenda, and supplies a far-flung network of contributors, often people of unusual distinction outside journalism, the like of which is much harder for a secular weekly to establish. The core of this internationalism may be the Church in the World reporting at the back of the paper, a section to which John particularly applied his famous industry. But at the front, enlightening features regularly appear - whether about Latin America or eastern Europe, especially - covering ground neglected throughout the rest of the British press. In a globalised world, John’s unfailing resistance to parochialism has been a major explanation of his paper’s steady success at home and abroad.
Thirdly, he knows his subject as well as he understands his audience. John, let’s never forget, is a serious Catholic. He has read the encyclicals and the other texts. He has penetrated deep into the faith, as converts often do, putting us cradle Catholics to shame. He knows the post-conciliar history of the Church as well as any man alive.
He knows the back alleys of Rome and the Vatican, the safe houses where contacts may still be found by an editor not entirely approved of by Cardinal Ratzinger. No prudent bookie would fix odds on likely papal successors without touching base with John – even though he expressed as much sceptical uncertainty as anyone about how the forces in the consistory would in the end be ranged. His role in the Church nearer home has been just as sophisticated.
Though The Tablet’s readership is conspicuously global, its domestic voice matters. John’s editorship coincided with a series of battles for supremacy between the Vatican and domestic hierarchies, especially over episcopal appointments. Under Cardinal Basil Hume, the English Church was remarkably free of the divisions that scarred its continental counterparts. The cardinal had his ways of pre-empting the imposition of bishops from what one can only call the hard right. Himself personifying the English temperament of tolerance and moderation, Hume ensured for the most part that John Paul II was deflected from making appointments that would challenge if not insult that national characteristic. But The Tablet had a big role there too. As the main lay tone-setter for both intellectual and political Catholicism, it nurtured a climate in which Hume was able to defend his offshore outpost against the turbulence that some forces in Rome desired to unleash upon it. Without John’s personal knowledge and watchfulness, and the respect in which he himself is held, this could not have happened to such benign effect.
Finally, though, one goes back to his grasp of the elusive quality that few other editors have to think about so carefully. In this, he would agree, he has been supported throughout his time by The Tablet’s owners. The paper is not a wholly, or even partly, owned subsidiary of the Church. The owners and the board have been as assiduous as the editor in sustaining that position, just as they have scrupulously avoided intervening, except sometimes on necessary budgetary matters, in the editorial decisions the editor makes. They, too, know what independence means.
But it is the editor who has to apply that easily-stated philosophy in more complicated practice, and this is what John has been doing for 20 years. He is a friend of the Church but not its slave, an ally but not one subornable into believing that criticism amounts to disloyalty. Above all he has been a friend, through some taxing times, of The Tablet’s ever-expanding circle of readers. Without that bond, an editor will always fail. He must know how to challenge as well as satisfy them. In the challenge lies the satisfaction, for readers of a paper like The Tablet. Supplying both is what made John Wilkins a great editor.
A tribute to John Wilkins by Hugo Young, published in 2003, the year he retired as editor of “The Tablet” in a collection of essays, “Unfinished Journey, the Church 40 years after Vatican II”, edited by Austen Ivereigh and published by Continuum.
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